‘The Other Child,’ by Charlotte Link, and More

April 19, 2013

Crime

By MARILYN STASIO

Charlotte Link, a best-selling author in her native Germany but previously unknown to American readers, has the eerie insight peculiar to writers of psychological suspense. While most of us look at our neighbors and see ordinary people living humdrum lives, they see something dark and menacing beneath the surface.

The story of THE OTHER CHILD (Pegasus Crime, $25.95) is all the more unnerving because certain chapters are told from the perspective of Fiona Swales, who was one of the children evacuated to the English countryside in 1940 during the London blitz. Fiona and another child, an orphan who attaches himself to her during the train journey, are taken in by kindly Emma Beckett and brought back to the family farm to live with her own teenage son, Chad. Although a city girl, Fiona falls instantly in love with the “endless fields” and “dreamy little villages” of the Yorkshire coast and returns to the farm when her widowed mother remarries.

It’s in Yorkshire that we catch up with Fiona in 2008, living in Scarborough and a frequent visitor to the farm, where her dear friend Chad has done a terrible job of raising his daughter, Gwen, a plain, old-fashioned, “elderly girl” in her mid-30s who is about to make the mistake of her life by marrying a handsome and financially desperate fortune hunter. Fiona’s meddlesome intervention upsets the wedding plans, which are further complicated by two seemingly unrelated murders.

Every well-built psychological suspense narrative involves a thorough, methodical dissection of characters we’ve been led to believe we already know. It’s a delicate skill, and authors like Ruth Rendell have made it into something of an art form. In this translation by Stefan Tobler, Link demonstrates the same subtle touch, keeping the reader’s eye trained on Fiona and the guilty secret she shares with Chad, while distracting us from the innocent-­looking characters standing quietly in the shadows. Or have I already said too much?

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

For want of a better term, Peter Lovesey’s novels about Peter Diamond, the chief of detectives in the historic English city of Bath, are designated as police procedurals. But these erudite and wondrously witty books are unlike any police procedural you’ve ever read. THE TOOTH TATTOO (Soho Crime, $25.95) is a case in point. Of course there’s a murder to be solved — a curious one, involving a young Japanese music lover who has come to Bath in hopes of hearing a celebrated string quartet known as the Staccati. But for the most part, the murder investigation provides the structural framework for a group portrait of the eccentric members of this captivating ensemble and the music they play with such rapturous devotion.

Lovesey’s droll humor is on ample display as the members of Diamond’s investigative team poach ideas from “C.S.I.” and tease their gloomy chief for behaving like the depressive Scandinavian policemen in popular fiction. (There are also inside jokes for the musically minded, like the one about Odessa being the source of all the world’s great string players.) Even the murder investigation is fun, in its own peculiar way; but for death-­defying thrills, nothing quite compares to the Staccati swinging into Beethoven’s Quartet in C sharp minor.

One of these days, World War II will come to an end, and then how will we manage without Bernie Gunther, the cynical Berlin cop who has somehow contrived to stay alive and retain some vestige of personal integrity in Philip Kerr’s harrowing historical thrillers? Bernie is still trapped inside Nazi Germany in A MAN WITHOUT BREATH (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), although in a relatively protected position with the Bureau of War Crimes in the Wehrmacht’s legal division. But when a mass grave containing thousands of Polish officers is uncovered in Smolensk, Bernie finds himself back on the Eastern Front, looking for a way to pin the blame for the Katyn massacre on the Russians, which would alienate their Western allies and possibly turn the tide of the war. Meanwhile, he’s fresh out of schemes for keeping certain attractive Jewish women and their families out of detention camps.

These are the kind of lose / lose situations Kerr loves to toss Bernie into. But as a regular guy living in irregular times, Bernie is even more out of his element among the Prussian aristocrats in Smolensk at a classical music concert. Kerr’s sardonic vision always encompasses wry humor, even amid the horrors of war.

“We don’t have serial killers; we don’t have kidnappings; and there aren’t many rapists out there attacking women on the streets,” Inspector Avraham Avraham patiently explains to an anxious mother who has reported that her 16-year-old son is missing. The conscientious hero of D. A. Mishani’s first mystery, THE MISSING FILE (Harper, $25.99), needn’t sound so wistful. Young Ofer Sharabi has indeed disappeared, an event that sends shock waves through his modest neighborhood in a suburb of Tel Aviv. But instead of attending to suspicious clues — like the overly helpful neighbor who tutored Ofer in English — Avraham plunges into bitter self-doubt and reproach. Mishani, the crime fiction editor of an Israeli publishing house, clearly knows his field, and in Steven Cohen’s smooth translation he delivers a solid brainteaser. But a more satisfying way to read this mystery is to take it for what it really is — a thoughtful character study of a good man deeply troubled by issues of innocence and guilt.